The second runner-up in the just conducted presidential election of the Nigerian Bar Association, Mr Dele Adesina (SAN), has called for the cancellation of the poll and the conduct of a fresh one on the grounds of alleged fraud.

The election was won by Mr Olumide Akpata.

In a petition to the Chairman of the NBA Board of Trustees, Dr Olisa Agbakoba (SAN), Adesina alleged that the electronic election was “riddled with electronic fraud where the server used for the election was loaded with predetermined data.”

Adesina said, “The fact that Mr Olumide Akpata has now become the beneficiary of this flawed and manipulated process does not validate or make the flawed process acceptable.

“Our ICT consultants informed us that though the voting site might have appeared credible on the surface as a decoy, it is apparent to state that the data uploaded to the site was programmed and preconfigured to achieve a premeditated result in an obvious case of data diddling.

“Right from the outset of the election and up till the end of same, all the candidates virtually maintained the same percentage of votes relative to each other and the total votes cast.

“This fact alone is indicative of the possibility of a system, which was programmed towards a predetermined result.

“A close examination of the recorded result at different timelines shows percentage movement of the presidential candidates as 54, 23 and 21 with little or no variation. The system was obviously programmed to distribute votes at either +1 or one throughout the 24-hour period.

“According to the interim report of our technical team, ‘statistically, the voting result showed no randomness of any sort, which raises the question of whether there was no tampering of votes.’”

Adesina also alleged that about 40 per cent of voters could not vote as they were not sent the links to do so.

“Does this not call into question the capacity of the portal used for this election?” he queried.

Adesina added that several members of many branches of the NBA, “including but not limited to Ikeja, Ibadan, Enugu, Ilorin and Kano branches of the NBA, were starved of voting links for the election.”

Insisting that the election must be cancelled, Adesina said, “It is needless to say, Mr Chairman and other members of the Board of Trustees of the NBA, that if the process is wrong, the product cannot be right. If the election process is wrongful and unconstitutional, the outcome must suffer the same fate and be cancelled.”

PUNCH:reports